According to the Sports Xchange, which is a wire service, the Pirates still haven't finalized their deal with Francisco Liriano yet. Apparently the club would like to bring Liriano in on a minor league deal (presumably with similar terms to the deal he's been close to signing multiple times) with a shot at earning a […]

  With the beginning of spring training approaching and free agency pretty much wrapped up, we've hit the portion of the off-season where the prospect-ranking people do their prospect ranking. In turn, that means that it's time for me to start paying attention to prospects and to swear that this is the year that I […]

Over at SB Nation today, Grant Brisbee has a good piece up about the Pirates' "perfectly whelming" offseason that addresses something I've wanted to talk about for a while: the perception that the Pirates have mostly been sitting on their hands over the winter.  The Pirates haven't done a lot over the winter, of course, […]

  A couple of months ago, word leaked out that the Dodgers were close to a TV deal with FOX that would bring the Dodgers somewhere in the neighborhood of $6-7 billion over 25 years, bringing them something along the lines of a quarter billion dollars a year. Today, Bill Shaikin of the LA Times is reporting […]

With Francisco Liriano officially signing with the Pirates yesterday, details about his mysterious "non-pitching arm" injury were bound to emerge and today we have some thanks to Bill Brink at the PG, via El Caribe, a Dominican newspaper. The report is that Liriano broke his humerus by falling in his bathroom and that his arm was […]

If you had to look at the whole of 2012 — the excitment, the disappointment, all of the individual breakouts and meltdowns — and wanted to take one thing away from it that would bear well for the future, I think that most Pirate fans would take Pedro Alvarez's breakout season. At this time last […]

After a long, weird negotiation, Ken Rosenthal reported this afternoon that the Pirates and Francisco Liriano have finally finalized a version of the two-year/$12.75 million contract that we'd all thought the two sides agreed to back before Christmas. The main difference in the deal is that if Liriano misses any time this year due to […]

When the news came out a couple of days ago that Andrew McCutchen wouldn't be taking part in the World Baseball Classic because he wanted to dedicate himself to getting ready for his 2013 season with the Pirates, I had two thoughts:  1.) Well, at least he won't get hurt or burn himself out early […]

Almost immediately after I pushed "publish" on that last post, news came across the interwebs that the Pirates had agreed to a one-year deal with Jeff Karstens. Bill Brink at the PG is reporting that it's a one-year deal worth $2.5 million, which you may note is actually $600,000 less than he made with the Pirates […]

In general, the arc of winter for a Pirate fan goes like this:  Depression bought about by the end of the season. Talking yourself into the coming season's team as the front office makes trades and signings. Release of the ZiPS projections, followed by the crushing realization that upcoming Year Y will be no better […]

It would be fairly easy to write the trade the Pirates made today with the Indians that sent Quincy Latimore into Cleveland's system in return for Jeanmar Gomez as a minor move of little consequence, but it's early January and nothing else is happening. Plus, I need to get back into blogging shape for spring […]

Remember way back before Christmas when the Pirates signed Francisco Liriano? And how that signing basically sealed the deal on a Joel Hanrahan trade on the assumption that Hanrahan's money was going towards Liriano? And how we all spent a bunch of time discussing whether or not Liriano was a better or worse risk/way to […]

The Pirates and Red Sox didn't waste much time after Christmas to get the Joel Hanrahan trade finalized, and the result isn't much different than what we were all speculating about back on December 23rd. We already knew the deal was going to involve Hanrahan going to the Red Sox with Jerry Sands, Stolmy Pimentel, […]

We're rolling up to the 18-hour milestone in the extended saga that's been the Joel Hanrahan trade, and we still don't know the full details of the trade. This is what we think we probably might know at this point: Joel Hanrahan will go to the Red Sox, along with another unnamed Pirate or Pirate […]

I woke up early today, got in my car, drove from North Carolina back to Western PA, opened up my phone, and found out

If you, like me, were waiting on the Pirates to do something this winter to address their rotation depth issues, it looks today like we're finally going to have some movement on that front. According to LaVelle Neal, the Pirates have agreed to terms with lefty Francisco Liriano on a two-year/$14 million deal that's contingent […]

Source: Grilli back to

With one day of the winter meetings behind us, there wasn't much action on the Pittsburgh Pirate front. In a press conference at the end of the day, Neal Huntington admitted that Joel Hanrahan's probably not as valuable on the trade market now as he was six months ago (this is kind of common sense, […]

Today is the first official day of baseball's annual Winter Meetings, which means that for the first four days or so of this week we'll be innundated with tons of rumors and who knows how much actual payoff for those rumors by the time Thursday rolls around. The Pirates have claimed that they're going to […]